Los Dos Miscreantos

(Arthur wrote this in response to this article by Mark Morford.)


The boys, aka Los Dos Miscreantos, developed a taste for "Raki" in Istanbul. Each of them purchased a bottle, Charlie's had several traditional cups with it, Robert, swank dude that he aspires to be, bought one said to be the "Johnny Walker" of Raki. Whatever Raki is. High proof windex, perhaps. They were using a phone card and bubbling with delight over their purchases and the trip, having the night before wandered the streets with a phrase book asking "where are women?" If you even wondered the meaning of the term "Innocents Abroad", this is it. Robert said Charlie was pretty seriously drunk, but since he is so big nobody probably would mess with them. Probably. I believe that there is an entire class of angels who hover around young people who have more nerve than common sense, snatching them away from the terrible things in life that any reasonable person assumes should finish them off. Some children have angels that have pulled muscles and plan to apply for disability when they are done protecting their charges when the youths they are assigned to turn 30.

My oldest, the brilliant idiot, told me some years ago that he had been practicing the best way to jump off a fifteen foot wall, if one needed to do that to escape pursuit. Now, as a parent, and one who blundered through life in his own time, one immediate question springs to mind: Who exactly did he believe he would need to escape from by jumping off a convenient fifteen-foot high wall without injuring himself? A wise parent, one learns that certain questions are best not asked.

Anyhow, so there the two world travelers were, ready to catch a plane from Istanbul to Dulles Airport, on their own, feeling quite the WT (World Traveler) and generally suave and oh-so-international. Ahem, and also nineteen and twenty. Every once in a while a father has really got to step in and deliver some really bad news. Lucky for them they have a nice mother (sometimes) so a DHL box just arrived, which from its weight and gurgle I believe is very likely to contain two bottles of vintage Raki.

A local wilderness supply store has a large bottle of used Swiss Army knives, $5 each. The owner buys them in bulk from Homeland Security. Meanwhile the ports permit forty-foot long containers to enter, often without any inspection. In England they recently discovered that some of those containers in fact have up to thirty people in them, behind a false layer of pineapples or something. An entire room, with cots, etc. But do our Homeland Security laddies think to investigate containers? Nope, sorry, too busy ruining the lives of travelers and making them take their clothes off, the better to sow fear and obedience in the American public. My older lost his Driver's License. Well, okay, he did not actually LOSE it so much as had it pulled from his fingers and torn in two, just because he sort of drove his car off the road a tiny wee bit and refused, refused on Constitutional Grounds to lower himself to the indignity of a Breathalyzer Test. I mean, what would Thomas Paine have thought of a Breathalyzer? Franklin? Jefferson? Not much, thanks anyhow.

But I digress... so he sort of doesn't really have the best ID in the world, since we impound his Passport to keep him from losing it. But you can fly with a Student ID card, except then you have to go through a super-special high-risk security check for badass people. They shoot a blast of compressed air at you an analyze it to try to spot chemical residue. Stupid, stupid, stupid government. Will no one deliver me from these fools?

Arthur